One Year Monk

Loneliness is dangerous

PITTSBURGH — Before opening fire on an aerobics class, George Sodini wrote about feeling lonely and rejected – yet those very characteristics put him in the company of other mass killers whose isolation helped create a murderous cocktail.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

Loneliness is dangerous.The One Year Monk writes here with sensitivity for guys like Georeg Sodini. Another HuffPost blogger, Logan Nakyanzani Pollard, wrote a follow up piece in which she said she's tired of the sob-stories of guys like Sodini. Her rage is certainly justified. Sodini, like all rapists, is a terrorist. I just don't know how she thinks this lack of compassion will protect women?

There are more Sodinis brewing out there. Some of them are going to snap. Most of them won't. Most of them will live angry, sad lives and die lonely and no one will care. They will feel forever cut off from women as this biological imperative aches within them, subverting reason, giving them tunnel vision.

Also from the post above:

Many mass murderers feel rejected by a "pseudo community" that may exist only in their minds, said Dr. James Knoll, a forensic psychiatrist at the State University of New York's Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. ...

"He probably worked out at this gym, he was tanning and working out, trying to improve himself," Knoll said of Sodini. "These are things he thought would get him a relationship. It wasn't working."

And it's not going to work. So what do we do for people whose heartache becomes a danger to the public? It's an anguish that I'm relatively sure that a woman as attractive as Pollard cannot comprehend. The One Year Monk has never felt the degree of detachment and loneliness of a Sodini, but he's got a compassion for them. I can see why they feel so desperate.

The truth is that we live in a world in which we see people coupling up happily all around us. There's this very sad minority who can't make it happen. The message they receive from the media is that there is someone out there for them. For some folks, that just isn't true. No one wants them. They send up red flags. They don't have that hot quality. Not a whiff of it. The longer they go without, the more anxious they feel. Who's looking out for the very lonely?

Some of them snap and do terrible things. They should be punished, but I can't help but think that finding the very lonely, the desperate, listening to their sob stories and offering them an alternative (not hope that they will find someone, but an alternative) would help prevent violence. I suppose it's fine to hate the killers, but what about loving the lost before they kill?

If you feel lost alone, please yet the One Year Monk know. This site is for you.

Here's what Dr. Helen Fisher says

Dr. Fisher says that the One Year Monk is an Explorer/Negotiator. This means that my personality is dominated by dopamine, but that Estrogen plays a pretty big role too. It also means that I am drawn either to other Dopamine heads or to people that exhibit Testosterone traits (Directors). 

Interesting, I guess.

Want to know what you are? Check it out: The Why Him / Why Her Test.

It would be cool if you told the One Year Monk your results, below. 

Some links on commitment

Let's Call the Whole Thing Off by Sandra Tsing Loh, in The Atlantic. Ms. Loh confesses to an infidelity that led to divorce. She makes a strong argument for doing away with marriage, but, as in the case of Against Love, the problem is what you do -- especially with children -- without marriage? There's the proverbial rub. Ms. Loh attempts to offer a sort of modest proposal at the end, but it's an obvious rush job with no practical value at all. At least not now. Not yet. It's a fun read, though. I laughed at this paragraph:

Rachel sees herself as a failed mother, and is depressed and chronically overworked at her $120,000-a-year job (which she must cling to for the benefits because Ian freelances). At night, horny and sleepless, she paces the exquisite kitchen, gobbling mini Dove bars. The main breadwinner, Rachel is really the Traditional Dad, but instead of being handed her pipe and slippers at six, she appears to be marooned in a sexless remodeling project with a passive-aggressive Competitive Wife.

Marry Him! By Lori Gottlieb, also in The Atlantic. A video in the attached depicts the editor of the magazine who says that this essay caused more letters to the editor than anything printed in the magazine in the last decade. The One Year Monk has a pretty different reaction to this piece than most others. The question isn't whether or not Gottlieb has it "right" or "wrong" at all. What are people so threatened by? She's offering her perspective for younger women.

In the video, she says it really well. She says, looking back on her 20s and 30s, she passed up on some guys who were definite 8s, when she's come to doubt that the 10 even exists. It's a compelling argument.

Anyway, The One Year Monk, you might imagine, has gotten some pretty harsh reactions when he has questioned the notion of having children or getting married. Saying things like that really threatens people. Folks, step off. We all have a right to live our lives the way we want. We also have a right to offer a bit of advice based on our own perspectives and life histories without you getting all up in our Kool-Aid about it.Especially if we offer it in the pages of a magazine that you can choose to read or not read.

Gottlieb had a funny paragraph, too. Here you go:

Take, for instance, books like Men Are Like Fish: What Every Woman Needs to Know About Catching a Man or Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School, whose titles alone make it clear that today’s supposedly progressive bachelorettes aren’t waiting for old-fashioned true love to strike before they can get married. Instead, they’re buying dozens of proactive coaching manuals to learn how to strategically land a man. The actual man in question, though, seems so irrelevant that, to my mind, these women might as well grab a well-dressed guy off the street, drag him into the nearest bar, buy him a drink, and ask him to marry her. (Or, to retain her “power,” she should manipulate him into asking her.)

Anyway, let's hear from the other side before we give Gottlieb too many props.

For our first try in the counter-Gottlieb set, I went to Liesl Schillinger at The Daily Beast, who wrote Give up on Mr. Perfect? Executive summary: FAIL. Schillinger's vitriol here is transparent. She doesn't like that Gottlieb questioned feminism. She buys into the whole gospel. No critique is welcome. Fuck you very much, Gottlieb, she says. It's a silly little essay that falls prey to the same fallacy as most romantic advice writing: she generalizes.

Most of page 2 is devoted to the notion that there are some older single women out there that are living it up and happy to be solo. She thinks this is some kind of gotcha. Please. I guarantee you I know what Gottlieb would say about that, because she didn't write the book for them. She wrote the book for women who want to be married. I mean, in fairness, Gottlieb posits in her original essay that any single woman over 35 is getting anxious. I suspect they are, but some are also anxious and not-anxious at the same time. Some have chosen to ignore the anxiety and live it up. Good for them. That's how The One Year Monk hopes to go out, too. He is also anxious. He is also trying to ignore it.

But just because Gottlieb advises women who want to get married to think about Mr. Pretty-Great over Mr. Perfect does not make her a Feminine Benedict Arnold. Sigh. No funny paragraph in this one.

Jessica Grose in Slate is a whole other story. Her piece, What Lori Gottlieb's Marry Him got wrong about single women, is considerably more compelling. She focuses on the statistical data to see if Gottlieb is making much ado about nothing. She points out that college-eduated women are seeing diminishing divorce rates, that women who marry later get divorced less and that women who are married and have been get depressed more often. All interesting.

I don't think it helps if you are one person in this sea. You're not a statistic. You're lonely. You want to be married. Again, The One Year Monk argues that you'd be more content if you didn't fall back on love for your fulfillment. You don't have to live that way.

That said, I think Grose's piece shows the most sensitivity (even more than Gottlieb) to the notion that different people need different things from life. Compound our inherent American individuality, then, with the facts of our condition in life. It's a bit of hash. Anyway, Grose's last sentence is good for a laugh, so give it a skim if you're curious but read every word of the last paragraph. Nice payoff.

All of the four pieces really come down to this question: how can we construct society so that we'll all be less sad. It's not: how can we be happy. It's: how can we ease off the misery-acceleration-pedal? The One Year Monk, but he thinks that all four pieces assume that the answer lies somewhere in how we construct the arena of Love.

The One Year Monk doubts we'll find the answer therein.

The problem of romantic advice

The problem of all romantic advice columns, from Dear Abby to Carolyn Hax's "Tell me about it" to Savage Love, The One Year Monk contends, is this: they assume we all have the means to succeed in love. 

The One Year Monk spent the last few hours writing in the Project's book. The book is so much different than this blog. The book is personal; the blog is a crusade. The crusade I'm waging on here is for the ugly folks, the awkward folks, the self-conscious folks, the non-sexy. I'm crusading for those who are doomed at Love. There is an answer: give up. Life has a lot to offer you. Let go of this one pursuit. Win more. Do more. Feel more. 

You don't have a shot at Love? So what. You don't have a shot at the NFL either. You going to mope about that? No, you're not. You can deal with that, so deal with this the only way that makes sense.

So much of the advice out there is given by attractive people who have had lots of amorous success and succeeded with lots of people. They know that until very old age sets in they will always be able to find someone. They will not be alone.

If this blog resonates with you, though, it's because you don't feel that way. You don't really think you can find someone. It feels somewhat hopeless. You know what? Maybe it is. And even if it isn't, the last person you need to listen to is someone who's never had your problems. This is the myth behind romantic advice columns: that courting is a skill you can learn. For some of us, there's no getting better. It's something you got or you don't.

No one wants to say that out loud, though. But I'll say it. When I write in my book, it's those moments as a guy that just can't make it happen that I dwell on in there. So on here, as I read the little blog posts and newspaper stories by hot people trying to help the lumpen, well, I want to scream. And that's what I do. On here, I scream a bit for those of us who weren't born quite as gifted as they were. 

Don't listen to them. If you're like me, they've nothing to say to you. 

Linky Winky: Some blog posts I checked out today

Read-dating. Speed-dating with a bibliophilic bent. As silly as any other dating idea, but not bad.

Manly advice on putting a guy in the friendzone. It's true: the only clueless person in this story is the woman who believes a guy she keeps hanging out with ought to "just know" she isn't into him. Women. 

I was an abstinence only guinea pig. Curse you, George W., and your silly penchant for fear-mongering.

Teens all think they are going to die. OK, that's an overstatement, but there is evidence that they have a severe morbidity. Yet they keep screwing. Why? Talk amongst yourselves. 

Sex addiction: is it real? Or, is this the stupidest question posted on the internet today?

How to get over someone - advice from a guy and a girl. Caution: this advice is only useful for hot people. But who cares about non hot people, right?

My twitter page.

Figment of my imagination

My mental health is outstanding these days. I think it's because no single woman is dominating my attention, but I can't be sure.

I feel sort of like a newly minted cult member. "Everything is so clear now!"

I can't imagine it will last, but abstinence seems to be doing my brainspace a lot of good. I'll keep you posted. 

AGAINST LOVE: and the One Year Monk's answer

Oh for Heaven's Sake, I give up. This book doesn't have any point at all. I tried and tried to find any point at all in Laura Kipnis's Against Love, but I can't find any. That's why I am just lumping her last two sections together here. It's all gobbledygook you already know, anyway. It's a book about how marriages have a way of falling prey to adultery. How people get bored with their sex lives, feel empty inside and get irresponsible. It's also about how people seem to have very similar relationships to their spouses that they do to their jobs: people don't really know that they want them anymore, but they are stuck with them and need to work hard to stay there.

The question Kipnis seems to be raising is, well, why? Why work so hard to maintain something you don't really like any more?

She doesn't really raise any interesting answers. And don't even hope for her to come up with any sort of alternatives. She doesn't even try.

I didn't learn anything in particular from this book, but I guess I did figure out something sort of interesting about myself. Kipnis drones on and on about the emptiness people feel after spending a certain amount of time in a relationship.

The One Year Monk has never felt empty. The One Year Monk knows why. The One Year Monk has never been with anyone anywhere close to long enough to feel that emptiness. He just can't identify.

So I can't really judge how important the issue is at the heart of this book.

That said, I can make this judgement: there aren't any answers here. Maybe if you're cheating and looking for a kindred spirit then this book might be for you. And maybe if you're wondering whether or not this new love you've found will keep its meaning in a way that the love you've betrayed didn't, Kipnis does have a pretty good answer for that: it probably won't. She doesn't quite seem to think that that means you shouldn't try, though.

In some ways, Kipnis's little polemic reaffirmed the One Year Monk's commitment to staying a monk for one year. Here's what The One Year Monk suspects: the problem isn't love dying; the problem is living for love.

Women are a drug

And I'm pretty sure I'm an addict. 

This isn't true for everyone, of course. To most men, women are people that they are sometimes really attracted to and sometimes just have sex with and sometimes have real relationships with. 

The One Year Monk is not there, though. The One Year Monk can no longer relate to women as individuals. They are objects that stimulate different receptors in his system. He's a chick junkie.

When one gets to this point, he can't think about any one in a rational way. His only thought with regard to anything she says or anything she does is "did that feel good?" or "did that feel bad?" All one can do, at this point, is to try to get the particular generator-of-stimuli in front of him to generate more good things and fewer bad things, and if she starts to create more bad than good, then find a new source of stimuli.

There are 3 Billion of them out there. 

And here is the really important point: it doesn't truly matter if the woman in front of you is generating the BEST stimuli. You know: does she love you? Are you getting laid? Does she think you're the greatest? That's all great, but as long as you're getting attention, affirmation and a tiny bit of affection then it's enough. If you're a junkie. If women aren't women but drugs with a vocabulary. 

Look, junkies like to get good junk, but failing good junk, any old junk will do. You get to a point as a junkie, I know, when you are so constantly scraping a few bills together and want the junk as soon as possible, that you don't ever get the really good junk anymore. You'd rather get the bad junk sooner than get the good junk later. So you live in a constant state of okay junk.

I know some of you could read this and think the One Year Monk is being really fucked up here. The One Year Monk is really fucked up, but it's not what he's saying that's fucked up. It's how he is. In other words, it's not that women are junk, right... it's just that he's lost the ability to treat them as anything but stimuli.

That's why he has to quit cold turkey.

When you're the sort of guy who is good at getting women to hang around him, but maybe not good enough to get them to really like-like him, then you've got a problem. Being around pretty women always, always feels good. So you keep doing the thing that makes them come around. Even if it's not as good as it could be, it's something. And if you're never quite satisfied and you always want more, then you do it more and more and it becomes a problem.

Or, at least, it has, for me. I'm doing this because I can't quite think rationally about women anymore. They can't tell that. As far as they can tell I'm just this sort of loud guy who's good at listening, says funny things and always knows what the smart kids are doing in town. Good guy to know, right?

But, from my perspective, I'm making myself crazy. I'm not fully sure that I'd be able to handle it if I didn't take this break. That's why I have to take this break. That's why I'm doing this. 

AGAINST LOVE: Love's Labors -- first section down

In my senior year of college, when all my friends were spending much of their time reminiscing about a time in their lives, that, in retrospect, had no sooner gotten started than it came to an end, many of the memories they recounted to me included a similar story: that time my significant other and I had sex in the library. Apparently, this was normal at my school. People had sex in the library. Lots of people. Lots of sex.

Who knew?

Everyone but me.

I feel like I am in a similar place as I grow older. As the break-ups of my friends accumulate. As their desire to be free and play the field wanes and anxiety waxes. Somewhat suddenly, come to find out, it turns out that sex is awfully important to people. They really just can't stand the thought of a life without a lot of terribly good sex, for a very long time. I had no idea. Sex is very important to Laura Kipnis, author of Against Love, a book that I began to confront here. I'm 51 pages into her book and I'm not sure what problem she's trying to solve. She has discerned that people are often unhappy in marriage and that they often stray.

True, true.

She seems to applaud adulterers, without quite recommending it. She definitely believes that coupledom profits society and its economy more than it profits any individual person. Is that her problem?

Is the right society, in Kipnis's mind, one that most profits the individual? Maximum individual freedom, whatever the social cost?

It's funny that I'm fighting Kipnis so hard here. I know it's ironic. Her project and mine seem to be fellow travelers, if not quite the same. At least complementary, no? Her resistance is sluttiness and mine is prudishness, sure, but we're both problematizing the status quo. No?

I can't help but think that her essential ideas are so horribly right-wing. At least, insofar as the Right has always been so Capitalistic. That they have always placed the right to a shot at supreme and all-conquering wealth above the rights of the masses to three square meals and freedom from fear of being trampled. In other words, individuals before the commonwealth.

That's why it's always been odd, to me, that, socially, Right-wingers are so prudish. Sure, sure, let a man gobble up all the property he wants , pay workers a dollar an hour and pump his shit into the river everyone used to swim in. What's the problem? But let one dude bang another dude in the privacy of their homes? Gross. No way! That's gotta be stopped. 

Ironic.

Flip-flop the two, and you've got the Left.

Why is that?

I like to think that I'm a little more intellectually consistent. I want a state and a society that provides for security from want and, more importantly, from irresponsibility (though, if a dude wants to bang another dude it's fine with me -- I'd just rather he picked one and stuck with him). I especially want a state that will absolutely crush you if you betray other people over, take more than your share, break your contracts or just act like the sun rises and sets on your hind-end.

Let me take a crack at the Constitution.

That would be something.

Especially once I break the year of no-sex mark. Yeah!

Oh, right... sex is what I was writing about, wasn't it? OK. Back to that. Kipnis's book dwells on the fact that when "l'amour" fades all a couple has left is rather liking each other. Wouldn't it be better, she asks, if you could feel that excitement forever.

Am I alone in answering: not really?

If all you care about is the way you feel, then, sure, I suppose. But isn't there more to life than feeling good? To everything there is a season, and all that? Isn't that love and lust and horrible torridness a wonderful part of youth we're meant to love and enjoy and thrill in but ultimately move on? And be better for it? When I was child, I played like a child. But now I have a grown and put away childish things... and all that?

Am I crazy?

Lately, friends, acquaintances, people on trains have been telling me that their sex lives have lost that zing and they aren't sure what to do about it. I am just flabbergasted that they didn't see this coming. Has it ever, in the whole history of mankind, lasted for any couple? And why would you want it to? Doesn't the time come to quit boffing and discuss whether you can afford for one of you to go to grad school?

I am crazy. Fine.

Kipnis posits an unconscious conspiracy to keep us locked in coupledom or at least guilted into keeping up its appearances. I don't quite disagree, I'm just not sure that our growing tendency to fail in keeping up such appearances is necessarily hinting to a better world. It strikes me that more and more people today really do seem to yearn for those feelings of youth to go on forever.

Could it be that once upon a time people didn't have those kinds of expectations? I don't want to call those different expectations "realistic," because of the pessimistic connotations that word conveys. No, a simpler, older word, I think, in this case, applies. Couples of yesteryear were, I daresay, on balance, a bit wiser.

I am struck by this in Kipnis's polemic: she's the first writer I've ever come across that recognizes Ambivalence as fundamental to the human condition. Most people think of ambivalence as a weak sort of indecisiveness. I don't. I think the ambivalence that defines us is one of powerful internal conflict. We hunger both for that adrenaline rush of good sex and and early love and also for that touching familiarity that is only afforded by time. It's not like deciding whether you want the cake or the pie. It's like deciding between hanging out with Mick Jagger or Albert Einstein.

Most writers, I find, believe a person needs to "Know thyself." That is, "decide what you really want." In all serious matters, I believe (and maybe Kipnis would, too) that this is wrongheaded. I believe the best we can do is clarify everything we want, make a decision and accept the trade-offs.

Why must their be trade-offs??? The modern (especially the liberal modern) cries. Because there are fucking trade-offs. Get over it.

So you want security sooner-rather-than-later and the money to have fun? Guess you better use that Accounting degree and be an accountant rather than moving in with your bandmates and making the proverbial go-of-it. In this sort of clear-headed, no-nonsense decisionmaking, I believe, lies real wisdom. You live life relishing both your profits while accounting for your costs.

Well and good.

Kipnis seems to understand Ambivalence. She just doesn't seem to understand that ledgers can and should change.

Anyway, anyway... my point in bringing up the question of ambivalence is just to say this: the very fact that she acknowledges it earns her a pass with me (Thank God, she sighs, what would I do if One Year Monk wouldn't give me a chance? Fear not, milady, I will). I'm willing to wait to see what sort of alternative she proposes or at least what question she settles on. I hope, in the end, she at least acknowledges the notion that perhaps, perhaps the success or failure of a relationship can be judged my more yardsticks than simply the steaminess at bedtime.

We'll see.

You will be happier if you take responsibility for yourself?

After taking my petty delights in Carolyn Hax's downfall yesterday, I decided to give a skim to some of her more recent columns. I found this passage in her offering from January 4th.

That's why I think it's harder in the short run to choose celebration over blame -- you have to take responsibility for more of your own bad outcomes. "He's a great guy" becomes, when it doesn't work out: "He really is a great guy, he just doesn't love me," or "I took him for granted, and didn't treat him the way he deserved." It's so much easier to save face with "I thought he was a great guy, but he was just another loser."

Hax argues here that it's easier to find what sucks about a given situation than what's good about it. All good. Here's where she loses me: she also argues that the unhappy person is a victim whereas the happy person takes responsibility for her destiny.

Maybe she's just giving one case, while recognizing, internally, that there are many ways to be unhappy. I hope so.

Because, I have to ask: what about the person who looks at his life, says: I'm kinda fat, I'm awkward, I don't make a lot of money and girls make me nervous. I can't really blame them for not liking me, but man does it suck?

What about that guy? He's not a victim. He's not cursing anyone.

Or what the guy who is an even harder case: I'm not bad looking, I do okay in life, I have friends but I just can't get anyone from friendship to romance. Why? Why? Why? He knows he must be doing something wrong, but he doesn't know what. He's not a victim, but he is a failure.

How can he try a little harder, Carolyn, and find a way to be happy?